How To Improve Your Website Load Time

According to a recent research and statistics, it has been learnt that an average user will not have the patience to wait for your website to load. He will not wait for anymore than 3-4 seconds and will move to another website. Also, the website loading time plays a major role in improving any website’s ranking for a search engine. It has also been learnt through a survey that 75% people agreed with the fact that they will not like to revisit any website that takes time to load and for them, 3-4 seconds is too late. If you are a website owner, you must understand that having a fast website is very important for you otherwise your competitors will leave you in the dumps. If your website is slow, do not expect it to have visitors and huge traffic.

How-To-Improve-Your-Website-Load Time

Understanding the way website loading works

If you want to improve the loading speed of your website, you must understand how the website loading time works. The loading time of a website is interrelated with the request made on the server in order to load a website. I must mention that loading times depends a lot on the HTTP requests sent to the server. Also, the website will be much slower if the elements on the website take a lot time to load.

Another very important thing that plays a major role in website’s time load is the individual size of the files and images available on the website. If your website contains unusually large images, obviously your website will take a lot of time to load.

If you want to make your website a fast one, you need to make sure that your website is efficient. Improving the website load time can be done by making a few minor changes in website’s coding, image resolution and of course the layout of the website.

Keep a track of your Page Speed

Keeping a track of your page speed is not at all difficult. With the usage of Google’s page speed insights, you can keep a track of your page speed. Other than this, YSlow from yahoo is another great tool to keep a check on your website’s speed. These work really good and you can analyze what makes your website slow and exactly how much.

Step 1 : Compressing Images

Images are one of the major reasons behind your website’s slow loading. It is very important for you to compress images according to web-based quality. Compressing images is not at all difficult as you can simply do it by Google’s page speed plugin. Once the image has been compressed, reload the image.

Step 2 : Scaling Images

After the compression of images, scaling images is very important so that the fit into website properly. This is very important because it omits the server’s need of resizing the images during website’s loading. Scale images by using Photoshop and adjust the pixel size according to the HTML code.

Step 3: Make use of browser caching

This is a great way to reduce the server lag so utilize the browser caching facility. you can add following code on your .htaccess file for reduce server log time.


# BEGIN Expire headers
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 2592000 seconds"
# END Expire headers

Step 4 : CSS Sprites

CSS Sprites is indeed a great way to reduce the number of images added on a single page. It is basically like a collage i.e., one large image containing a lot of small images. You can combine a few images and make them one by using CSS Sprites. This way, website will load one image and five will be displayed.

spriteme is helpful tool to create CSS sprites.

Step 5 : Deferring the JavaScript’s parsing

At times, JavaScript blocks page rendering due to which the loading of the website gets slow. In order to avoid this thing, you should avoid calling these scripts in the beginning and should prefer calling them at the end of an HTML.

For example

[code type=javascript][/code]

Step 6 : Compressing HTML, JavaScript and CSS

You can compress HTML, JavaScript and CSS in order to speed up the loading procedure. You can find various resources on the web for this procedure and t will help you a lot.

Step 7: Content Delivery Network

CDN is a great way to eliminate server’s lag. A lot of websites user CDN among which the well known are NBA.com and ESPN.com and I must say that these websites are not at all slow when it comes to loading.

Step 8: Combination of JavaScript and CSS

If you will load various JavaScript and CSS files, you will make your website extremely slow. Try to combine JavaScript and CSS within one large file. By doing this you will be speeding up your website like anything.

Step 9: Website for mobiles

While you are developing a website or an app for mobile, I would strongly recommend you to go through Google’s webmaster guidelines for smartphone applications. Although, the guidelines are constantly changing however, you should be aware of the basic requirements for creating a website or an app for mobiles. I am sure in the coming years, a website’s speed will be among the most important things to consider while developing a website.

Conclusion

The above mentioned things might be a few but they play an important role in improving the speed of any website. If you have a website that loads quickly, you will surely see a drastic change in your website’s traffic and also your website’s ranking will improve greatly. While developing a website, always think from a visitor’s perspective. If you are not willing to wait for a website to load (let’s accept it, none of us waits for a website to load if it is taking too much time) why would anyone else wait? So, give your visitors a sigh of relief by implementing these changes and speeding up the loading time of your website.


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5 Comments

  1. Tonyking says:

    When a website loads fast,it makes visitors to stay,this post is really helpful.thanks

  2. KK says:

    HI, Can you tell me the Step 8, what is the “Combination of JavaScript and CSS”? and what is the “Website for mobiles” to ues Chinese?

  3. Bart says:

    #BEGIN Expire headers gives me an internal server error.

  4. Organized says:

    Hi Humaira, thanks for your advices.

    Im my experience, when you visit a website because you have some interest on it, you wait until the whole thing loads, even if it not very fast.

    On the other hand, when you are simply surfing the web, a lazy website has all the odds to be closed befote if loads completely.

    Anyway, fast loading websites are always better than the same website with slow loading times.